Iroquois Confederacy Research Articles

The Iroquois Confederacy and the Possibility of Heteronomous Democracy

Abstract Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997) argues that the project of autonomy appears in only two societies throughout human history: ancient Greece and Western Europe. Is this true? The present study examines the case of the Iroquois Confederacy with the intention of testing Castoriadis’s argument. Using the debate between Castoriadis and the members of mauss as its starting point, it interprets historic Iroquois institutions with reference to what Castoriadis presents as the two inextricably linked conditions of an autonomous society: democracy and philosophy. Ultimately, the essay contends that while Castoriadis justifiably interprets the Iroquois Confederacy as heteronomous, the confederacy’s democratic institutions compel us to doubt the necessary connection he posits between democracy and philosophy. Iroquois society created a heteronomous democracy, a type of polity that Castoriadis’s theory of autonomy occludes.

Exploring Iroquois Culture in Joseph Bruchac’s Peacemaker: A Framework for Ethical Decision-Making Rooted in Core Character Value

Ethical decision-making is deeply intertwined with the foundational cultural values that articulate and embody core character virtues. These values find expression through moral and virtuous principles, shaped by social and cultural constructs, thereby guiding community behaviour. In the realm of environmental ethics, culture significantly influences the placement of the non-human world within various spectra, be it at the pinnacle, bottom, or as equals. Trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, and caring, the core character values, are intrinsically linked to where the non-human world stands in this context. Joseph Bruchac, a revered Native American author, revisits the historical genesis of the Iroquois confederacy, shedding light on the intricate relationship between the human and non-human worlds in his novel, Peacemaker. This paper delves into comprehending the Iroquois culture as a foundation for ethical decision-making, with a specific focus on core character values such as trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, and caring.

Justice Samuel Nelson and the Seneca Indians

Justice Samuel Nelson and the Seneca Indians Laurence M. Hauptman (bio) Scholars examining the career of Justice Samuel Nelson, who served on the Supreme Court from 1845 to 1872, have considered the jurist's record on the bench to be mediocre.1 According to historian Frank Otto Gatell, Justice Nelson "did not leave a deep impression on the history of the court."2 Political scientist Carl B. Swisher concluded that Nelson was a "stable, sound, and unspectactular judge"; that he "was not a man of deeply philosophical bent or soaring imagination"; and that he exhibited an "unwillingness to stretch the law to make it conform to local moral sentiment."3 Indeed, Nelson has largely been viewed through the lens of his concurring opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857).4 Consequently, scholars have labeled him a "doughface justice," castigating him, along with Justice Robert Grier of Pennsylvania, for being the only two Northern jurists on the bench who voted with the majority in the case.5 In assessing Nelson's overall importance, scholars examining the justice's service on the Taney-led and Chase-led Courts have failed to analyze or even mention two of his most important opinions: Fellows v. Blacksmith (1857) and The New York Indians (1866). In the first of these cases, Nelson favored the Tonawanda Senecas; a decade later, the justice favored the treaty rights of the Seneca Nation of Indians.6 The cases permanently affected the Tonawanda Senecas and the Seneca Nation of Indians, two separate, federally recognized governments that today occupy four reservations in western New York State: Allegany, Cattaraugus, Oil Spring, and Tonawanda. After the Revolution, the Senecas, original members of the Iroquois Confederacy, occupied approximately six million acres of lands. Their vast territory was attractive to land speculators, promoters of canals and turnpikes, New York politicians pushing for Empire State development, and Americans seeking access to the Great Lakes and Ohio Country. As a result, from the time of the federal Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1784 onward, [End Page 7] the Senecas faced unrelenting pressures to cede all or select parcels of their land. Despite specific assurances made by the Washington administration in the federal Treaty of Canandaigua in1794 to guarantee the Seneca land base, dispossession continued. In the federal Treaty of Big Tree in 1797, federal officials recognized ten, later eleven, Seneca reservations totaling 202,000 acres. However, because of the nefarious actions of state and federal politicians in collusion with the Holland and later Ogden Land Companies, the Senecas continued to be dispossessed and threatened with removal to the Indian Territory well into the 1850s.7 The question arises about why Nelson favored the Senecas' position in his opinions in 1857 and 1866. After all, Nelson had been a loyal member of Martin Van Buren's Albany Regency, the fledgling Democratic political machine that dominated New York politics in the 1820s, and which in the 1830s had pushed for Indian removal from New York State. Even Nelson's appointment to the United States Supreme Court in 1845 was tied to Jacksonian politics after three Whigs had been rejected by the Democratic-controlled Senate.8 However, Nelson was to write the Court's opinion in Fellows v. Blacksmith. and convince all of his fellow jurists, including five appointed by Presidents Jackson and Van Buren, to vote with him. He even persuaded Justice James Moore Wayne, a Georgian who had actively been a proponent Click for larger view View full resolution Table 1. Seneca Land Losses in Treaties During Justice Nelson's Lifetime* [End Page 8] Click for larger view View full resolution Scholars mostly remember Samuel Nelson as a "dough-face" for his concurring opinion in Dred Scott v. Sand-ford (1857) and have failed to consider two of his seminal opinions favoring the Tonawanda Senecas and the Seneca Nation of Indians. of removal of Creeks and Cherokees, to support his opinion.9 Justice Nelson's favorable response to the crises facing the Senecas was conditioned by a myriad of factors. He selectively drew inspiration and ideas from four separate sources. First, Nelson's residence in Cooperstown, New York, and his connections there to the family of James Fenimore Cooper...

The Hill Cumorah: Restoring a Sacred Site

The Hill Cumorah: Restoring a Sacred Site

The Storied Landscape of Iroquoia: History, Conquest, and Memory in the Native Northeast

The Storied Landscape of Iroquoia: History, Conquest, and Memory in the Native Northeast

Food Sovereignty Practices at the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin Tsyunhehkw^ Farm

The paper looks at the role of traditional foodways and related cultural practices in Oneida’s contemporary food sovereignty efforts, and the various understandings of the continuity of food and agricultural traditions in the community. The tribe’s Tsyunhehkw^’s (joon-hen-kwa) farm, whose name loosely translates into “life sustenance” in English, serves important cultural, economic and educational purposes. It grows Oneida white flint corn, which is considered sacred by the tribe and is used for ceremonial purposes, it grows the tobacco used for ceremonies and runs a traditional Three Sisters Garden. The Three Sisters – corn, beans and squash, are an important part of the Oneida creation story, as well as the vision of Handsome Lake – a Seneca prophet from the turn of the 19th century, who played an significant role in the revival of traditional religion among the People of the Longhouse.[1] They inform the work done at Tsyunhehkw^ to provide healthful food for the Oneida community.
 
 
 [1]The Oneida form part of the Iroquois Confederacy (as called by the French), referred to as the League of Five Nations by the English, or the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, as they call themselves. Haudenosaunee translates into the People of the Longhouse. The Confederacy, which was founded by the prophet known as Peacemaker with the help of Hiawatha, is made up of the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. It was intended as a way to unite the nations and create a peaceful means of decision making. The exact date of the joining of the nations is unknown and it is one of the first and longest lasting participatory democracies in the world (“About the Haudenosaunee Confederacy” 2019).
 

Beyond Settler Sovereignty: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination by Mark Rifkin

Reviewed by: Beyond Settler Sovereignty: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination by Mark Rifkin Penelope Kelsey Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Sovereignty: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. 296 pp. Cloth, $99.95; paper, $26.95. Mark Rifkin's Beyond Settler Sovereignty offers a series of important critical insights as it brings the theoretical body of queer temporalities into conversation with the field of Native American and Indigenous studies. In the first chapter, Rifkin relies upon non-Native theorists like Henri Bergson, Lauren Berlant, Albert Einstein, Johannes Fabian, and Elizabeth Freeman to lay groundwork for understanding settler heteronormative conceptions of time; he then engages Native American and Indigenous studies scholars like Kevin Bruyneel, Mishuana Goeman, Deborah Miranda, Audra Simpson, Dale Turner, Robert Warrior, and others to build parameters for understanding how Indigenous formulations of time might differ and proceeds to debunk the myth of a "global 'coevalness'" (21). In fact, Rifkin warns, to insist upon a shared experience of time between settler and Indigene "reduces the immanent trajectories of indigeneity (processes of Native becoming) to a set of points—the supposedly shared now of the present, modernity, national history, and so on" (26). In this chapter, Rifkin also sets up important theoretical concepts that he will track throughout the book like storying and backgrounding. In his second chapter, Rifkin opens with an anecdote about viewing the film Lincoln and its silent portrayal of Seneca hahësnowa:nëh (Chief) Ely S. Parker, a representation that he finds ultimately stands for Native peoples' struggles for sovereignty and the ways in which Native American identity precludes inclusion in a national narrative that centralizes the Civil War as integral to becoming. For Rifkin, Lincoln's imagining of the Civil War and its meaning can be better apprehended by analyzing "how periodization participates [End Page 323] in the storying and unfolding of national time, giving shape to the present and the sense of its potentials by reactivating . . . an inherent perceptual tradition" (50). Rifkin traces a process he calls the emancipation sublime and uses it to denote the war's meaning as a vehicle for making apparent the state's inherent democracy, a process that disallows Native peoples' inclusion in the "temporality of the union" (51–52). Rifkin's argument is convincing in many ways, but would be helped by spending time on the intersections of "the union" and Parker's role in both it and the Iroquois Confederacy, given the founding fathers' employment of Hodinöhšö:ni:h governance as a template for designing US democracy. This concern is a minor quibble in a book spilling over with impressive insights about Indigenous temporalities and their relationship to sovereignty, however. Rifkin concludes the chapter with an analysis of non-Native depictions of Indigenous military actions in the 1862 Dakota Conflict as "temporally exceptional" (67). In the third chapter, Rifkin analyzes how allotment sought to impose settler temporality upon Native people through its enforcement of nuclear family structures, individualized land ownership, and participation in a cash economy and its dismantling of traditional forms of governance and cultural expression (namely clothing, language, religion, gender). Focusing upon John Joseph Mathews's novel Sundown, Rifkin argues its main character Chal's "feeling of queerness" as he comes of age attests to "the emergence and persistence of modes of perception, experience, and memory that link Osage people to that place" (98–99). Rifkin explores the Osage mineral estate as furnishing "a basis for common experiences of time" and reflecting a "duration of peoplehood," in spite of allotment efforts to divide Osage lands and dissolve these ties. Rifkin concludes that Mathews's portrayal of Osage people during the "Great Frenzy" gestures toward Osage ways of occupying the land that emphasize silences and "becoming," and depicts signal markers of Osage temporalities that run counter to American development narratives. Rifkin's fourth chapter centers on portrayals of the Ghost Dance in Sherman Alexie's Indian Killer and Leslie Marmon Silko's Gardens [End Page 324] in the Dunes, focusing on the role of prophecy, cross-temporality, and asynchrony in Indigenous temporal formations that he terms prophetic temporality. Rifkin sees Alexie's deployment of the Ghost Dance as an...

The Harvard Law Review and the Iroquois Influence Thesis

Abstract In a recent Developments in the Law chapter on the Indian Civil Rights Act, authors and editors at the Harvard Law Review seemed to take seriously the so-called “Iroquois influence thesis,” the idea that basic principles of the American government were derived from American Indian nations, in particular the Iroquois Confederacy. Although the influence thesis has acquired a life of its own, being taught in some of America’s elementary and secondary schools, it is nonsense. (One of the sources cited in support of this made-up history is a congressional resolution, as if Congress has some special, historical expertise.) Nothing in American Indian law and policy should depend on the influence thesis, and it is unfortunate that a prominent law review has given it credence. This article explains how the Harvard folks were misguided and why the influence thesis should be interred.

Change Amid Continuity, Innovation within Tradition: Wampum Diplomacy at the Treaty of Greenville, 1795

Abstract The Treaty of Greenville (1795) was noteworthy for the extensive use of wampum by both Western Confederacy leaders and the American negotiator, Anthony Wayne. Analysis of the rhetoric of the negotiations and the wampum article used reveals structural correspondences with traditional Iroquoian diplomacy. Evidence suggests that the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, while not officially in attendance, exerted significant influence on the treaty process. Amid this continuity, however, the Native negotiators put wampum to innovative uses. Examination of specific wampum presentations offers an interpretation of a surviving belt and insight into a design now known as the Two-Row Wampum.

Revenge Against the Idol: Competing Magical Systems on the Detroit River, 1670

The Michigan Historical Review 43:2 (Fall 2017): 55-63©2017 Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved Revenge Against the Idol: Competing Magical Systems on the Detroit River, 1670 By Martin W. Walsh Thirty years before the 1701 founding of Detroit, and nearly a decade before La Salle sailed his Griffin through the strait in 1679, the Detroit River was the scene of a major clash of cultures and a conspicuous act of iconoclasm. The first explorers to record passage through le Détroit were two Sulpician Fathers, and their adversary on this occasion was a stone idol situated on the river somewhere in the vicinity of Belle Isle. Until the end of the seventeenth century, the French route to the Great Lakes was by way of the Ottawa River to Lake Nipissing, then to Georgian Bay in Lake Huron. Lakes Ontario and Erie remained relatively unknown due to the hostile presence of the Iroquois Confederacy, particularly the Seneca Nation. When the French forged a treaty with the Confederacy in 1667, initiating a peace that lasted nearly twenty years, it opened a route to explore, map, and evangelize the Lower Great Lakes for the first time. Governor General Daniel de Rémy de Courcelle dispatched a combined missionary/exploratory expedition to the area headed by two Breton Sulpician priests, François Dollier de Casson, an ex-soldier, and René de Brehant de Galinée, together with the explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle. The Sulpician Fathers (Compagnie des Prétres de Saint-Sulpice), founded only two decades before in 1647, were missionary rivals to the better-known Jesuits. The total expedition consisted of twenty-one men in seven canoes, along with two additional canoes of Seneca guides. They set off from Montreal on 6 July 1669. Galinée, a latecomer to the mission, was tasked with chronicling the voyage in a written report (procès-verbal) and mapping the newly explored areas, as he had some training as a surveyor. In the ensuing months, the joint expedition explored the southern shore of Lake Ontario and crossed the Niagara Peninsula at lake’s end, following the Grand River into Lake Erie. The first impression of the lake was under October gale winds, prompting Galinée to exaggerate that “there is perhaps no lake in the whole country in which the waves rise so 56 The Michigan Historical Review high because of its great depth and its great extent.”1 Erie’s weather would indeed prove their nemesis. Before forced into winter quarters near present-day Port Dover, Ontario, La Salle split from the Sulpicians, pursuing his own quest for the fabled river “Ohio.” The missionary party, now reduced to nine men in three canoes, spent a relatively comfortable winter on the north shore in what Galinée called le Paradis terrestre du Canada.2 It is not clear whether they had any Native guides at this point; an Amikwa (Nez Percé) captive obtained from the Seneca is the last mentioned by Galinée. After celebrating Easter on 6 April 1670, and with the lake still full of ice, they continued their traverse of Lake Erie. In the second week of April, after a long day’s paddling of some twenty leagues (40 miles), they reached the eastern shore of Point Pelee, a “beautiful sand beach” which today presents much the same look as it did then.3 The party was thoroughly exhausted from the day’s exertions, which caused them to leave their heavy packs on the beach and drag their canoes up to the tree line. During the night, a fierce northeaster racked the lake and a storm surge hit the beach, sweeping away much of the expedition’s equipment. Guns, ammunition, and provisions were sucked under the waves but most disastrously, their complete altar service was also lost. This altar service most likely consisted of a specially-constructed wooden case that would have opened out to present a consecrated altar stone with imbedded relics. The required Mass vessels—chalice and paten, with their vestments: the veil, pall, corporal, and purificator— would have been included, along with a crucifix, candles, and a missal, with possibly...

The Two Hendricks: Unraveling a Mohawk Mystery by Eric Hinderaker

400 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY In any case, these are minor criticisms of a thought-provoking and original book which more than proves its claim that ordinary people “built the early modern empire from the bottom up” (19). Those interested in New Netherland or colonial New York will find this book indispensible. But, as the author suggests, her work should also open a rich vein of inquiry into the composition and role of intimate networks in other imperial settings. The Two Hendricks: Unraveling a Mohawk Mystery. By Eric Hinderaker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011, 368 pages, $35.00 Cloth. Reviewed by Ryan Staude, Windward School The “mystery,” which Eric Hinderaker explores in The Two Hendricks: Unraveling a Mohawk Mystery, is how two Mohawk chiefs, Hendrick Tenjonihokarawa, and Hendrick Theyanoguin, became conflated in the historical record. It was not until the 1990s that scholars began to separate the two men, and it took some time to reach a scholarly consensus that they were not the same person. Even Hinderaker admits in a footnote that he started the project in 1995 “under the assumption that there was one Hendrick” (303). If any doubters remain this book should be enough to convince them of their error. Hinderaker quickly “unravels” the mystery of the book’s subtitle. By the second page the reader knows that there were two Mohawk chiefs who bore the name Hendrick, and that for over one hundred years historians believed that there was only one “King” Hendrick. This was in part due to the lack of written histories on the natives in the nineteenth century, but also because the confusion had begun as early as the 1750s (a decade after Hendrick Theyanoguin’s death) with a Trenton newspaper maintaining that the two men were the same person (297). Erasing any ambiguity about the existence of two separate men, Hinderaker clearly states the book’s central theme: the roles of the two Hendricks in the maintenance of the Iroquois Confederacy in the midst of the struggles between France and Britain for mastery of the North American continent, and the importance of the Iroquois-British alliance to the eventual British victory over their imperial adversaries. The Six Nations of the Iroquois “decisively shaped” the outcome of the imperial Book Reviews 401 struggle (298). For Hinderaker, the lives of the two Hendricks demonstrate the perilous waters which Indians had to navigate to survive amid the rising tension between France and Great Britain. Tejonihokarawa, the older Hendrick, was a sachem from the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk tribe (the eastern-most tribe of the Six Nations Confederacy). He came of age in the 1670s and 1680s when New York colonial governor Edmund Andros’s Covenant Chain with the Iroquois was in its infancy. He rose to power in his tribe, and was baptized into the Dutch Reformed Church in 1690. Adopting the Christian name “Hendrick,” he established close relations with the Dutch Reformed ministers , and prominent Albany citizens. In 1710, Tejonihokarawa traveled to England with New York colonial officials where he was feted by London high society as the “Emperor of the Six Nations” (86). He even received an audience with Queen Anne and sat for a state portrait at her insistence. Hinderaker portrays this visit as transformative for both Hendrick and the British. The former saw the power and splendor of the London metropolis, while government officials and English propagandists began to increasingly associate the stability of Britain’s North American possessions with the maintenance of the Iroquois alliance. As Tejonihokarawa was cementing his status as the “bedrock of the Anglo-Iroquois connection” during the first two decades of the 18th century , Theyanoguin, the younger Hendrick, was coming of age in the Upper Mohawk community of Canajoharie, near the present day city of the same name. He made his first appearance in the public record in the fall of 1741. Theyanoguin quickly moved to the center of the Anglo-Mohawk relationship , and, along with William Johnson, became crucial in facilitating diplomacy between colonial officials and other members of the Six Nations Confederacy. Although he never traveled to England, Theyanoguin journeyed to Massachusetts and Pennsylvania and met with several prominent colonial administrators. Subsequently, he...

Nonviolence Writ Large

Say “nonviolence” today and your hearers are likely to think of protest marches and sit-ins, but nonviolence, as Mahatma Gandhi said, “is not the inanity it has been taken for down the ages.” It is a law of nature and can be applied in any relationship or situation, including statecraft. Indeed, Gandhi argued that “it is blasphemy to say that nonviolence can only be practiced by individuals and never by nations which are composed of individuals.”In North America, an early experiment in nonviolent statecraft began in March 1681, when King Charles II granted William Penn governorship of the vast territory in North America that today bears his name. Penn was a close friend of George Fox, founder of the Religious Society of Friends (the Quakers), and the Quaker regime he created remained an island of peace even as traumatic battles between Native Americans and European settlers swept over surrounding territories. Penn’s “Holy Experiment” only came to an end about seventy years later — not, please note, because the nonviolent colony could not defend itself but because later generations lost faith in its nonviolent principles. Those principles, along with some ideas borrowed from the Iroquois Confederacy, created a foundation of governance that we would envy today: freedom from racism and intolerance (Penn had himself been imprisoned in London for his Quaker beliefs), restorative justice (Penn reduced the 212 capital crimes under British law to two and made all prisons “work houses” for rehabilitation), democracy (even though the king had granted him absolute power over the colony), and peace. The “Great Law” that Penn established in 1682 did away with war and standing armies. What a contrast to the “statecraft” (or corporate craft?) working its violence today in Ladakh, as Helena Norberg-Hodge poignantly describes on page 34 of this issue of Tikkun.Though Penn was not aware of it, his was not the world’s first experiment in nonviolent statecraft (nor was it the last, as Matt Meyer skillfully shows in his essay on page 31). Around 260 bce, a great king of Northern India, Ashoka Maurya, succeeded in conquering a neighboring kingdom in a huge battle, but was so overwhelmed when he saw the devastation he had caused that he renounced war on the spot. Adopting Buddhism, which seemed at the time a more practical basis for compassionate rule, he actually expanded his reign to almost the whole subcontinent and his peaceful empire lasted until his death in 232 bce. Like Penn’s Holy Experiment, the Ashokan rejection of war did not occur in a vacuum but was built on aspects of nonviolence in the supporting culture, including nonviolence toward animals in Ashoka’s case, and religious tolerance. A famous edict of his states “He who cannot respect another’s religion has no respect for his own.”I happened to be in Japan when the first noises were made about abolishing Article Nine of the Japanese Constitution, which encodes Japan’s famous renunciation of militarism, and Japanese friends asked me how to prevent this loss. I argued that you can’t just renounce war, you need to adopt an alternative such as civilian-based defense (where citizens are trained to disobey coup attempts or foreign interventions) and/or unarmed civilian peacekeeping — the work being done across borders in dangerous areas by Nonviolent Peaceforce, Peace Brigades International, and about fifteen other organizations. Nonviolent statecraft must also include the kind of measures adopted by Penn and Ashoka to shift the paradigm from a national security state to “common security” or “total security.”Stephen Zunes, in his highly informative essay on page 29, explains that the successes of nonviolence he lists have not come, “in most cases, from a moral or spiritual commitment to nonviolence, but simply because it works.” In other words, we have seen by and large what Gandhi called “the nonviolence of the weak,” and if we think that’s impressive, just imagine what it will look like when we see the nonviolence of the strong — of those who could use force but choose not to because they have an inner sense that we’re all connected. Imagine.

(Dis)armed friendship: impacts of colonial ideology on early Quaker attitudes toward American Indians

Quakers’ early relations with American Indians (especially the Lenne Lenape, later known as the Delaware Indians) were generally positive. Core Quaker principles were simplicity, integrity, equality and peace – principles that could coincide well with those of the similarly egalitarian Lenne Lenape, who had been designated peacekeepers by the Iroquois Confederacy. Although the relationship was different than that of other settlers and American Indians, it was still suffused with colonial ideology. From the founding of Pennsylvania to the period of Grant’s ‘Peace Policy’, Quakers had to negotiate two wars and changing attitudes to North American Indians by American Presidents and government. The paper focuses on corresponding shifts in Quaker attitudes and policies. Our interest is in Quaker responses to Native Americans over time, finding that Quakers became increasingly distanced from the Indians and focused on acculturation. In their zeal to become acceptable to American Governments and through that, assist Native Americans, Quakers had, in fact, assimilated themselves.

Native Americans in the Susquehanna River Valley, Past and Present and In the Shadow of Kinzua: The Seneca Nation of Indians since World War II

Native Americans in the Susquehanna River Valley, Past and Present and In the Shadow of Kinzua: The Seneca Nation of Indians since World War II

Mohawk interruptus: (political life across the borders of settler states)

Acknowledgments ix 1. Indigenous Interruptions: Mohawk Nationhood, Citizenship, and the State 1 2. A Brief History of Land, Meaning, and Membership in Iroquoia and Kahnawa:ka 37 3. Constructing Kahnawa:ka as an Out-of-the-Way Place: Ely S. Parker, Lewis Henry Morgan, and the Writing of the Iroquois Confederacy 67 4. Ethnographic Refusal: Anthropological Need 95 5. Borders, Cigarettes, and Sovereignty 115 6. The Gender of the Flint: Mohawk Nationhood and Citizenship in the Face of Empire 147 Conclusion. Interruptus 177 Appendix. A Note on Materials and Methodology 195 Notes 201 References 229 Index 251

Benjamin Franklin's Intellectual World Paul E.Kerry and Matthew S.Holland, Editors. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012.

Benjamin Franklin's Intellectual World Paul E. Kerry and Matthew S. Holland, Editors. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012.Benjamin Franklin 's Intellectual World is the latest contribution to the ever-growing scholarly interest in Franklin's life and works. Recent biographies such as Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin: An Life (2003), Gordon Wood's The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (2004), and H.W. Brand's The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (2000) have contributed to the resurgence of interest in Franklin. Both the shadow of these recent biographies and the ensuing debates hang over Benjamin Franklin's Intellectual World.The impetus for this collection was a 2007 conference held at the University of Cambridge celebrating the tercentenary of Franklin's birth. The co-editors of the collection, Paul E. Kerry and Matthew S. Holland, find the conference location in the United Kingdom fitting for Franklin, who was the first as much as he was, for most of life, a loyal British subject. The collection attempts to bring together political thought and intellectual history in order to connect American and European ideas (ix). Some of the most novel explorations of Franklin's legacy in this volume focus on the exchange between the New World and Europe, an important concentration for a transatlantic figure like Franklin. Jurgen Overhoff's fascinating essay focuses on Franklin's often-overlooked trip to Germany in 1766. Overhoff argues that Franklin's visit and study of the Roman Empire was essential to conception of federalism, which went into own Articles of Federation and Perpetual Union of the United Colonies of North America (84). Scholarship on Federalism has often emphasized the example of the Iroquois Confederacy as being the preeminent model for colonists, but Overhoff convincingly argues that the Holy Roman moment may be just as important to early federalism (84).Another interesting transatlantic connection comes in Paul E. Kerry's essay on Franklin's influence on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. While Goethe and Franklin never met or corresponded, they had a great deal in common, as both held experiments, were involved in sute affairs, and helped to support or found civic institutions such as libraries and universities. However, Kerry's emphasis is that Goethe used Franklin's biography, which he read in 1810 prior to writing own autobiography, Poetry and Truth, in 1813-1814, as a model for his own self-fashioning and achievements, scientific and literary (155). …

“Indescribable Being”: Theological Performances of Genderlessness in the Society of the Publick Universal Friend, 1776–1819

In October of 1776 Jemima Wilkinson of Cumberland, Rhode Island, claimed to have died and been resurrected by the Spirit of the Lord as a genderless spirit, renamed the “Publick Universal Friend.” As a resurrected spirit, the Friend defied the line between living and dead, body and spirit, divine and human, and male and female. The Friend performed this spiritual state by mixing worldly category signifiers, dressing in a combination of male, female, and priestly clothing. Followers used genderless language for the Friend and in the 1790s founded Jerusalem, New York on lands purchased from the Iroquois Confederacy. Critics denounced the Friend’s gender ambiguity as a sign of devilry, and they linked it to fraud, licentiousness, and murder. This study draws on the methodological commitments of transgender theory to take seriously the Friend’s claim to have transcended gender, and it seeks to investigate religious challenges to gender “before” transgender. For early Americans, radical religious experience could be a site of gender crossing even as it reinforced worldly hierarchies and drove participation in settler colonialism.

The Rotinonshonni: a traditional Iroquoian history through the eyes of Teharonhia:wako and Sawiskera

In The Rotinonshonni Through the Eyes of Teharonhia: wako and Sawiskera, Brian Natoway Rice seeks to offer a comprehensive history based on the oral traditions of the Rotinonshonni (people of the longhouse). The book has its origins in Rice s study with traditional Cayuga royaner Jacob Thomas, who performed days-long recitations of the oral history of the Iroquois in English. Rice suggests that, My purpose in writing this book is to not only inform the reader about the traditions of Rotinonshonni society, but to also give the reader a sense of place for those traditions. I also wanted to show that as Indigenous academics we have our own cultural based methodologies. The book offers tellings of the Iroquois creation story, the origin of Iroquois clans, the law of peace, the European invasion, the life of Handsome Lake, and finally of Rice s own walk 700 miles in the footsteps of the Peacemaker (founder of the Iroquois confederacy), as Rice seeks to provide a written translation into English of Iroquois oral history, taking part himself as a member of a continuous tradition.

Introduction by the Onondaga Nation and activist neighbors of an indigenous perspective on issues surrounding hydrofracking in the Marcellus Shale

The introduction of an Indigenous perspective by Native spokespeople and their allies is a significant factor in an ongoing legal and discursive struggle over the future of unconventional gas drilling in New York. This paper analyzes the alliance between the Onondaga Nation of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy and an ally organization known as Neighbors of Onondaga Nation (NOON) as they cooperate to oppose slick water high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing, commonly referred to as hydrofracking, in the Marcellus Shale. We trace the history of cooperation between NOON and the Onondaga Nation and locate it in relation to other Native/non-Native alliances. We characterize the responsibility-based approach to law that is suffused throughout Haudenosaunee worldviews and legal systems and contrast it with the rights-based approach of New York State and US environmental and property law, in particular as this rights-based approach structures and constrains the process used to determine the future of hydrofracking in New York. We also consider these differences in the context of Onondaga self-determination and Native American treaty derived sovereignty. We conclude by suggesting that alliances between Native Nations and non-Native organizations might expand opportunities for including Indigenous perspectives on the relationship between society and nature in important decision-making processes.

Speculators in Empire: Iroquoia and the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix by William J. Campbell (review)

Reviewed by: Speculators in Empire: Iroquoia and the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix by William J. Campbell Timothy J. Shannon (bio) Speculators in Empire: Iroquoia and the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix. By William J. Campbell. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012. Pp. 278. $39.95 cloth) Historians have typically described the Fort Stanwix Treaty of 1768 as a land swindle. Although not as infamous as Peter Minuit’s purchase of Manhattan, it was more consequential, for it involved much more territory (parts of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, and Virginia) and left a far bloodier legacy. The British Crown had expected the Stanwix treaty to cement and pacify the boundary line established between colonial and native populations by the Proclamation of 1763. Instead, the treaty accelerated a frenzy of land speculation and alienated powerful Indian nations in the Ohio country who had been locked out of the proceedings. In Speculators in Empire, William J. Campbell sets out to rehabilitate the reputation of the Stanwix treaty. He describes Sir William Johnson, the royal Indian superintendent charged with conducting the negotiations, as a loyal imperial official who did his best to balance Crown interests with those of the Iroquois Confederacy. Likewise, Campbell depicts the Iroquois chiefs who were Johnson’s counterparts as canny, independent diplomats, not powerless dupes preyed upon by colonial land speculators. As Campbell tells the story, the British Crown and the Iroquois Confederacy worked as partners at Fort Stanwix in 1768: “Both parties knew that where Iroquois authority could be established so too might a British colonial system be extended—and eventually an effective trade network established and land sold, settled, and improved” (p. 69). Campbell is right to emphasize the partnership that Johnson and his allied chiefs forged to bolster each other’s power, but his analysis falls short of ushering the Stanwix treaty into the light of respectability. [End Page 235] As the book title indicates, land speculators played an important role in the treaty, creating a union between private interests and public policy that caused many Native Americans and even the British ministry to question the legitimacy of the treaty land cessions. The question is: who should take the blame? Previous historians have assigned it to Johnson. He purposefully departed from his royal instructions to extend the boundary line in ways that benefited his own speculative interests and those of his well-connected friends. Campbell is more generous to Johnson, describing his manipulations of the boundary line as well-intentioned improvisations meant to strengthen his office and protect Iroquoian homelands. Campbell blames the more sordid elements of the treaty on George Croghan, Johnson’s deputy commissioner, who pursued speculative schemes with a brazen chicanery that makes one wish he were alive to share a jail cell with Bernie Madoff. Campbell, however, lets Johnson off too easily. Johnson may have exhibited more concern for Indians than Croghan, but when it came to using their public roles to acquire native land, the difference between the two men was one of degree, not kind. Although he does a good job of explaining Iroquoian motives for participating in the Stanwix treaty, Campbell misses the opportunity to present other important native perspectives on it. He never fully explains why so few Ohio Indians (Delawares, Shawnees, Miamis, Wyandots) attended a treaty negotiation that sold away so much of their land. Likewise, he tends to speak of the six Iroquois nations collectively, slighting the local perspective of the Oneidas and Mohawks. Campbell claims that when Johnson extended the boundary line from the Susquehanna River to the Oneida Carry (the portage between the Mohawk River and Wood Creek guarded by Fort Stanwix), he was trying to protect eastern Iroquois homelands. Yet this extension left the Mohawks and many of the Oneidas east of the new boundary, rendering their territory less, not more, secure from speculators and squatters. In this case, Johnson appears to have been more concerned with protecting Croghan’s and his own land claims in the region rather than those of his Indian neighbors. [End Page 236] Among the strengths of the book, Campbell provides an excellent summary of the geopolitical significance of the Oneida Carry and the way in which...